City life may be trend, but many hearts hold place for suburbia

I listened intently recently to a woman, who said she specialized in transportation issues for the elderly and infirm, offer up the opinion that all the experts agreed that there’s a flight to the urban core, particularly by the young and the old.

She argued that both the Millennials (those in their 20s now) and the elderly (or baby boomers soon to be such) were reshaping our transportation and housing needs by choosing to move to increasingly dense urban cores, seeking the walkable, bikeable, mass transit accessible neighborhoods and the convenience of rental apartment and condo life.

I wondered at the time if that could be right: Do the urban planners who envision stuffing more and more of us into smaller and smaller boxes have it right? Do we really want to abandon our castles for homage to a landlord? Do we shed our cars and the unprecedented freedom of movement they provide (at least when the freeway isn’t completely stopped up) for a rail schedule and bus lines that often don’t take us where we want to go?

Neither of my kids’ experiences say this view is right.

The one has just closed on a condo in a rural Nebraska (she and her kids live in a town of 1,600 people eschewing the more urban university city, Lincoln). While the condo model fits the urban planner ideal, the house is more like a duplex, sharing only a wall and some common roof, but not the yards, sidewalk or mailbox or any common spaces. The setting is so rural that the horse farm my granddaughter works at is maybe 200 yards up the road on the other side of the corn field.

Meanwhile my son and his wife are looking for a place in Valley Center. A couple in their mid- to late 20s, they want to flee the urban core of San Diego for enough room to raise chickens, goats and (I hope, someday) babies.

And a friend told me just the other day that what she really wanted was a little cottage with a little bit of yard, at least enough for a tiny garden.

Then, there’s me. I am now in my 60s — old by the lights of my 7-year-old neighbor boy — I have not a shred of desire to abandon the suburbs.

OK, three or four data points doesn’t make for much of a trend, so it was with great interest that I ran across a piece by Joel Kotkin and others, titled “Retrofitting the Dream” (published here: